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americanslime  1yr ago (bracero.substack.com)   1242 thread views

Nature Watching Nature

bracero.substack.com

An essay I wrote a while back arguing that dialectical naturalism offers a solid footing for ethics. Since it's pretty core to my moral philosophy, I figured what better to toss to the hounds. Enjoy!

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This may be tangential to your main thesis, but when the opening quote says

Yes, the whole history of humanity, intellectual and moral, political and social, is but a reflection of its economic history.

it's expressing "historical materialism", which is altogether distinct from the metaphysical materialism that the rest of the article focuses on. We might ask e.g. "Did the philosophical ideas of John Locke cause the growth of democracy in the US, or were those ideas epiphenomena of power relations that were emerging anyway?" - but the answer could go either way regardless of whether physical matter is the fundamental stuff of the universe.

Well I agree that it’s distinct-Bakunin was basically a Marxist (even though he hated Marx’s authoritarianism), but I definitely don’t believe that it’s altogether distinct-Marx’s basic idea is to explain nature dialectically, he just happens to do this in a peculiar economistic way and believes he can make very specific predictions about political economy because of it. So while I agree he’s not as concerned with the metaphysics which the essay is about, they do stem from the same root imo

We simply are and to work your way from that seems good enough for the individual but how do you make such frameworks work for entire societies with varied perceptions and norms among individuals?

Those different individuals, norms, and perceptions exist in a social ecology. They compete, cooperate, exist symbiotically, and change over time in reaction to one another and to broader environmental conditions. It's not clear which of them are "right" per se, because what is "right" in most cases varies depending on a specific set of circumstances-we can and must reason about it, but making claims to knowledge is spurious. The point here is that there is a true "right way," but it changes-thus, no one culture or set of norms that I'm aware of is likely to get everything right at all times. Getting more into the weeds, the parent philosophy of dialectical naturalism is social ecology, which offers dialectical naturalism as an epistemological theory, and communalism as a related political theory.

You're gonna have to ask a more specific question than that lol

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